I tried to download Chromium but it’s a mess. No way a regular user will be able to download and install it. The will to do it will fade pretty quickly
Firefox doesn’t fucking work with my daughter’s online school. This is a national school that multiple states are adopting as a state online school (meaning it is a public school and we don’t have to pay tuition) and we have to use Chrome because I can’t get it to work in Firefox and I hate Edge. Even worse, a bunch of materials from the school either don’t mention which browser to use or specifically say you can use either Firefox or Chrome. I spent like half an hour trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. I did updates, resets, anything I could think of, until my wife texted me and said maybe it has to be in Chrome. And yep, that worked.
Of course, the school is run by Pearson, and they’re evil, so they probably have a deal with Google anyway.
Damn, that sucks. I have always been keeping my school/university stuff in a separate browser, so maybe your daughter can use something like Ungoogled Chromium for school and Firefox for everything else.
I’ll look into it eventually, but we had to do this at the last minute because we had to get school started and she gets annoyed when I try to do anything on the notebook while she’s around.
You can get browser extensions that change your user agent string, which websites use to fingerprint you. So you’re just spoofing a different browser/OS. I use this one.
Winget is awesome! It’s nice to see Microsoft finally focusing on adding basic quality-of-life features to their OS. First there was Windows Terminal, then proper bash support with WSL, and now package management with Winget! To be fair, it’s not 100% there yet. Tried installing ffmpeg with winget recently, and it took like three times longer than apt-get would have. But hey, better than downloading EXE’s from some random website. Really excited for what they’ll add next. Who knows, maybe Windows will finally be a viable desktop OS some day!
I prefer my pacman being able to cd to a directory and install there rather than winget’s “-location direct path” but yeah Linux is faster and better for tech illiterate people like myself
Linux is faster and better for tech illiterate people like myself
For real tho, I could never come up with a good reason why I choose Linux over windows. But recently I tried Windows 11, and that finally made me understand. What are sticky keys? Why are you telling me the exchange rate of EUR to USD right now? Why do I need to put .\ in front of my username when signing in? Why can’t you just tell me that you want TPM and UEFI boot enabled instead of cryptically saying that my hardware is incompatible even though it is? There’s just too much crap going on for a dumb fuck like me to understand. I would like one boring linux desktop experience that hasn’t changed since 2003 please.
While there are definitely options to just have a better experience with Chromium. You’re absolutely right that regular users are not savvy enough to get them.
Flatpak (and flathub.org) has been a lifesaver for this, I use Ungoogled Chromium. Of course only for the few broken shitty websites that I’m forced to use
I tried to download Chromium but it’s a mess. No way a regular user will be able to download and install it. The will to do it will fade pretty quickly
Firefox is better anyways
Firefox doesn’t fucking work with my daughter’s online school. This is a national school that multiple states are adopting as a state online school (meaning it is a public school and we don’t have to pay tuition) and we have to use Chrome because I can’t get it to work in Firefox and I hate Edge. Even worse, a bunch of materials from the school either don’t mention which browser to use or specifically say you can use either Firefox or Chrome. I spent like half an hour trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. I did updates, resets, anything I could think of, until my wife texted me and said maybe it has to be in Chrome. And yep, that worked.
Of course, the school is run by Pearson, and they’re evil, so they probably have a deal with Google anyway.
Damn, that sucks. I have always been keeping my school/university stuff in a separate browser, so maybe your daughter can use something like Ungoogled Chromium for school and Firefox for everything else.
I’ll look into it eventually, but we had to do this at the last minute because we had to get school started and she gets annoyed when I try to do anything on the notebook while she’s around.
Ugh, Pearson’s the worst. Have you tried a user agent switcher? I seem to recall that working when I last had to deal with their crap.
I don’t know anything about that. Can you point me to a guide?
You can get browser extensions that change your user agent string, which websites use to fingerprint you. So you’re just spoofing a different browser/OS. I use this one.
Thanks so much! I will check it out.
I’m happy with Safari but yeah Firefox is my other choice
I go to the software center, search chromuim, click install. Its that easy for Linux mint users
It’s that easy on Windows as well, depending on the package manager you prefer the commands are
Winget (native)
Chocolatey (third party)
Winget is awesome! It’s nice to see Microsoft finally focusing on adding basic quality-of-life features to their OS. First there was Windows Terminal, then proper bash support with WSL, and now package management with Winget! To be fair, it’s not 100% there yet. Tried installing ffmpeg with winget recently, and it took like three times longer than apt-get would have. But hey, better than downloading EXE’s from some random website. Really excited for what they’ll add next. Who knows, maybe Windows will finally be a viable desktop OS some day!
I prefer my pacman being able to cd to a directory and install there rather than winget’s “-location direct path” but yeah Linux is faster and better for tech illiterate people like myself
For real tho, I could never come up with a good reason why I choose Linux over windows. But recently I tried Windows 11, and that finally made me understand. What are sticky keys? Why are you telling me the exchange rate of EUR to USD right now? Why do I need to put
.\
in front of my username when signing in? Why can’t you just tell me that you want TPM and UEFI boot enabled instead of cryptically saying that my hardware is incompatible even though it is? There’s just too much crap going on for a dumb fuck like me to understand. I would like one boring linux desktop experience that hasn’t changed since 2003 please.While there are definitely options to just have a better experience with Chromium. You’re absolutely right that regular users are not savvy enough to get them.
Flatpak (and flathub.org) has been a lifesaver for this, I use Ungoogled Chromium. Of course only for the few broken shitty websites that I’m forced to use